Portfolio Computational Musicology
Although I am not a ’70s kid, Queen is very nostalgic to me. I remember
sitting in the backseat of the car, listening to my own CD with all the
hits of the famous rock band. I could sing along to every song, even
though I did not speak any English. The movie “Bohemian Rhapsody”
portrayed (though not completely accurate) a small portion of the lives
of the four band members. It reminded me of the solo careers three of
the members had, only John Deacon never went solo. The drummer Roger
Taylor was the first to release a solo album in 1981. After which
Freddie Mercury and Brian May followed. When I heard the song Time
Waits For No One for the first time not long ago, I thought it was
just a Queen song I had not heard before. When I noticed that it was a
song exclusively by Freddie Mercury, I wondered how it differed from
songs produced by the band. Freddie Mercury has had less success as a
solo artist than together with his three band members, what could have
been the reason for this?
Therefore, I will be comparing solo songs by Freddie Mercury with the songs from the band Queen. In addition to that, I will take a look at the solo songs by Roger Taylor as he was the first to go solo. There will also be some comparisons between Queen with Freddie Mercury as lead singer, and after the singer’s death.
Expectations
The band Queen is known for their grandiosity and experimentation. They
were not afraid to deviate from the norm and tried to mix all kinds of
genres together in their songs including rock, pop, metal, opera and
electronic music. It is therefore very difficult to pinpoint the
characteristics of Queen and to select typical songs. However, many
songs seem to be theatrical or dramatic featuring intricate arrangements
and harmonies, the lyrics have a message and explore complex themes, and
the songs are pushing boundaries of rock music. These qualities can be
clearly heard in what may be the most famous Queen song: Bohemian
Rhapsody, which includes the complex harmonies and shifts between
different genres such as rock, pop and opera. It also beautifully
displays Freddie Mercury’s impressive vocal range and theatrical
feeling.
Needless to say, these iconic vocals can also be heard in the solo
songs released by Freddie Mercury. He did seem to enjoy Disco music more
than the other band members. Disco music is known for its great
danceability. Therefore, the genre of disco music is characterized by a
strong and steady beat, often resulting in a 4/4 time signature. To add
more interest and to give songs more energy, guitar bass lines and drum
hi-hats frequently contained syncopated rhythms. Disco music also uses a
lot of different instruments and has repetitive but funky and soulful
vocals. The classic disco beat can be heard for example in the songs Love
Kills, Living
on My Own and I
Was Born to Love You on his album Mr. Bad Guy. Your
Kind of Lover from the same album also includes a typical disco
bassline.
In addition to disco, opera is also a common genre in the songs released
by Freddie Mercury. Together with opera singer Montserrat Caballé he has
brought out an album, from which the like-named song Barcelona
is most famous. These partially operatic songs will differ from the
Queen songs in genre and pitch.
Since Freddie Mercury was the chief songwriter of the band Queen, I also
expect lots of similarities, such as catchy hooks and melodies. On the
other hand, I anticipate Queen having more complex and grandiose songs
while Freddie Mercury will probably be more stripped down and focused on
vocals, piano and danceability.
Representation
I have tried to make as complete a list as possible of the solo songs by
Freddie Mercury. Nevertheless, there are a few non-original songs from
the two albums he has released (Mr. Bad Guy and
Barcelona) because those songs only are on Spotify as special
editions (listed in Song list 1.1) or new orchestrated editions
(listed in Song list 1.2). From what I can hear, those
non-original editions are mostly just better mixed than the original
songs. So, I have decided to include the songs to have a bigger set of
data since there already are much fewer solo songs by Freddie Mercury (N
= 25) in comparison to songs by the band Queen (N = 159). Regarding the
band, I have made a playlist with all albums going from 1973 till 1995.
Each Queen song is remastered in 2011, while Spotify only states that In
My Defence by Freddie Mercury is remixed in 2000. In Song list
2.1 I have listed just a few songs that stand out in the
discography of Queen in my opinion. In addition to these songs, the tracks
before Killer Queen was released sound less clear than all
songs that come after due to reverb on the vocals and guitar.
Besides those two playlists, I have created a small playlist (N = 13) with the songs that were released by the band after the death of Freddie Mercury so I can investigate how Freddie Mercury’s death affected the band. This playlist contains one track called Yeah which is precisely what the title suggests: namely 4 seconds of Freddie Mercury singing “Yeah”.
The playlist of songs by Roger Taylor consists of 44 songs from four different albums.
Song list 1.1: Special Editions Freddie Mercury
Song list 1.2: New Orchestrated Editions Freddie Mercury
Song list 2.1: Outliers Queen
Popularity
The first thing that stands out is that Roger Taylor is far less popular
than Queen and Freddie Mercury. The most popular song by Roger Taylor is
Man
On Fire and has a popularity of 39. It is part of the album ‘Strange
Frontier’ that was released in the UK in June 1984, with Man On
Fire single released three weeks earlier. The three most popular
songs by Queen are Bohemian
Rhapsody, Another
One Bites The Dust and Don’t
Stop Me Now which all have a popularity of 81. Danceability and
popularity seem to be correlated in Queen and Roger Taylor songs; the
more danceable songs are also more popular. Within the songs of Freddie
Mercury this pattern can not be found.
Instrumentalness
As for instrumentalness, Spotify was not too precise, since the song
with the highest score was Seven
Seas of Rhye which does have sung lyrics. The other songs at the
top, though, are The
Ring (Hypnotic Seduction Of Dale), Vultan’s
Theme, God
Save the Queen and Escape
From The Swamp which are all completely instrumental. In the top 10
most instrumental songs, seven are from the album Flash Gordon
which is an album made for the like-named science fiction movie. (If you
want to know more about this album, check the Queen official site.) In
the chromagram of the song Ming’s
Theme you will see how different these songs are from more typical
Queen songs. It seems that the more instrumental a song is, the less
popular it is on Spotify. There is one exception to this rule:
Another One Bites the Dust is one of the most popular songs by
Queen but has an instrumentalness of 0.312.
Valence
The happiest song according to Spotify is Misfire
by Queen. Rain
Must Fall is following with only 0.001 points in difference. Both
songs have a danceability score above the mean of 0.462. This seems to
be fitting the norm; the happier a song is, the higher it rates on
danceability. The lowest valence scores are from the songs Ming’s
Theme and The Ring (Hypnotic Seduction Of Dale) which also
both are very instrumental. The next song with the lowest valence is a
more typical song by the band, namely Who
Wants To Live Forever. This song also has the lowest danceability
score (0.099).
Explanation
Here you can see the mean tempo, the deviation of each song from that
mean tempo, the loudness in opacity and the beats per measure signature
in the size of the point. The biggest deviation can be found in the
oldest Queen songs, as the darker points are at the top and brighter
points are more toward the bottom, or in the songs with either a
relatively slow or fast tempo. Older Queen songs were recorded using
analog equipment, which may have had limitations in terms of capturing
precise tempos. This could have led to more variation in tempo in their
older recordings. It might also be, that the earlier songs were even
more experimental than later songs and incorporated more styles that
suited more tempo changes.
The song with the highest deviation in tempo by Freddie Mercury is a more classical song he released together with the opera singer Montserrat Caballé. In the tempogram you will also see how hard it is to extract the tempo using computation.
Time signature
Spotify API had a hard time with the songs Execution
of Flash as well as Ming’s
Theme by Queen because there is no consistent time signature. The
album Flash Gordon once again stands out, both of these songs
are part of it, and as you will see in the chromagram section, this is
not a typical album. The song Dear
Friends by Queen also stands out; it states that there is only one
beat per measure but when I listened to the song, I felt like the time
signature was 4/4. I do have to say that the arrangement with the piano
emphasized all beats very equally, that might be an explanation for the
weird time signature.
Emotion Model
I was curious about the emotion every song portrays. Freddie Mercury has
once said that he is very emotional. “I think all my songs are under the
label emotion. The more I open up, the more I get hurt, so basically
what happens is I’m just riddled with scars.” After Freddie Mercury’s
death, I could see songs portraying more of a sad emotion. Since emotion
is very complex, I have decided to simplify this by plotting the valence
(positive and negative) against the arousal (for which I have selected
high and low energy). This way, the songs are plotted on the 2D
valence-arousal model of Emotion in which each quadrant stands for a
different type of basic emotion (angry, happy, sad, peaceful).
Explanation
There seem to be very few peaceful and calm pieces, which corresponds to
the characteristics of the band. The only songs that are in this
category are from the band with Freddie Mercury as lead singer. After
the death of the singer, there seems to be a slight shift towards sad
and angry songs. Roger Taylor has more turbulent songs, while Freddie
Mercury also has quite a few sad songs.
Note
The plot can be a little seem a little overwhelming and cluttered, but
you can filter artists out by clicking on them in the legend or even
isolate them by double tapping them.
Explanation
For every 12 levels of timbre used by Spotify API I have plotted the
range for the songs by Freddie Mercury, the oldest songs by Queen
(released around the year 1973) and the newest songs with Freddie
Mercury still as lead singer (released around the year 1990).
According to the clusters, some of the timbre levels should be very distinct between the three categories I plotted. For example, from most useful to less useful, the levels 4, 12, 3 and 1 should be quite different. Unfortunately, timbre is a very abstract term to talk about music. According to Jehan (2014) timbre “is the quality of a musical note or sound that distinguishes different types of musical instruments, or voices.” Spotify uses 12 different levels to quantify timbre, the first of which is easy to understand, but that goes down very quickly. Level 1 represents the average loudness of a section and the second level calculates the difference in energy between lower and higher frequencies (this should represent the brightness, which is already much less concrete). The next dimension does this for the mid-frequencies (which should correlate to the flatness of the sound) and the fourth represents the energy of the attacks (the beginning of sounds).
As I have already said in the introduction, the first few songs sound less clear than all songs that come after due to reverb on the vocals and guitar. I think this relates to the brightness, flatness and attack of the tracks, which as you can see, all seem to differ quite a bit between the first 25 songs and the last 25 songs of Queen. Specially the fourth dimension, where the old songs have range much lower than both the older songs and Freddie Mercury songs. Freddie Mercury songs seem to have more overlap with the older songs except for the second dimension. I think the songs by Freddie Mercury have a huge range in this dimension because of the operatic songs that have more energy in higher frequencies and the electronic songs that have more energy in lower frequencies.
Reference
Jehan, T., DesRoches, D. (2014). Analyzer documentation (analyzer
version 3.2). Accessed 27 Mar. 2023
Chromagram
I have created three chromagrams to show the difference between a
simple, atypical Queen song and complex Queen and Freddie Mercury songs
that are very representative for their style. A chromagram shows the the
energy for every pitch class during a song.
Explanation
A very atypical song by Queen is Ming’s Theme (In The Court Of Ming
The Merciless). This song is part of the album that was made
specifically for the movie Flash Gordon. It starts with low
pitched electronic sounds and later on includes people talking. In the
chromagram you can see how the song starts on a note that is somewhere
around F sharp. There are two descending melodies leading to a note
between C and C sharp. After this, the talking starts with the same note
softly sounding in the background. Around two minutes into the song
there is another descending melody. The melodic part ends with a perfect
fifth (D and A). The song concludes with a dialogue from the movie.
Comparison
On the next page the chromagram of Don’t Stop Me Now and I
Was Born To Love You can be seen. You will see that this clear
distinction of notes and sections can not be made in a more typical
Queen song, also in a Freddie Mercury song this is much harder. Even the
key can not be easily identified.
Queen
For Queen, I think Don’t
Stop Me Now is a very representative song. It is very energetic,
melodic and euphoric. It is also one of the most popular songs according
to Spotify, along with Bohemian Rhapsody and Another One
Bites The Dust.
Freddie Mercury
For Freddie Mercury as a solo artist I have chosen the song I
Was Born To Love You, as it is the most popular song according to
Spotify. I also think it is quite representative for Freddie Mercury, as
it has a disco feeling and is very lively. The song The Great
Pretender is equally popular, but is a song originally by The
Platters and written by Buck Ram (their manager).
I have also plotted The Great Pretender as a chromagram (can be
seen on the next tab) and interestingly this was much more readable than
original Queen and Freddie Mercury songs, just like Ming’s
Theme.
Comparison
The chromagram shows that Don’t Stop Me Now contains lots of
pitch classes and it has thus very complex harmonies, while I Was
Born To Love You seems to have a bit more of distinct pitch classes
with high energy. The highest energy can be found in the class of G
sharp, this is also the key of the song. For Don’t Stop Me Now
it is harder to see the key, though the pitch class G seems to have a
slightly bigger magnitude than the other pitch classes, this song is in
the key of F major.
Explanation
As said before, this song is originally by the Platters and covered by
Freddie Mercury. In the chromagram you can clearly see that the song
starts in G major from the frequent bright yellow stripes, meaning that
there is most energy in the pitch class G, and modulates at the red line
to G sharp major. The pitch classes C and D are also used repeatedly in
the first 120 seconds. Freddie Mercury loved the song The
Great Pretender for its meaning as he felt like he played different
roles on stage; he went through different moods, wore different costumes
and became someone else with each costume.
Conclusion
Both Queen and Freddie Mercury songs are known for the intricate
harmonies, which the chromagrams seem to confirm. Though the solo work
might be slightly less complex and sometimes a little more stripped down
to focus on the rhythm and energy.
Self-similarity matrices
These are four self-similarity matrices, with the axes in seconds, that
show the pitch- and timbre-based self-similarity for every bar. At the
top you can see a song that is written and sung by the drummer Roger
Taylor but released as a Queen song. On the bottom the song Bohemian
Rhapsody, written by Freddie Mercury, can be seen. The song written by
Roger Taylor seems to have much more of a uniform structure than Bohemian
Rhapsody, which can be derived from the checkerboard pattern.
Explanation
The song I’m
in Love With My Car starts with a guitar riff accompanied with
repeating D chords on the piano, followed by verse 1 that makes use of
four different chords that are repeated after one another. After 60
seconds, the chorus starts in which Freddie Mercury sings backing
vocals. There is a slight change in color in the timbre-based matrix,
but I expected to see a greater change. The chords stay the same, thus
the transition from verse 1 to the chorus is not really visible in the
chroma-based matrix. At around 1:20 minutes (80 seconds) into the song,
the chords change. This can be clearly seen in the chroma-based matrix,
but is less apparent in the timbre-based one. That the guitar riff and
accompanying piano chords recur after this short change becomes evident
from both matrices. Then there is another verse that follows the same
structure as verse 1, but does include guitar riffs in the background.
The two matrices pick up the repetition in the second chorus very well,
resulting in diagonal lines at around 2:10 minutes (130 seconds). They
play once again some guitar riffs accompanied by the repeating chords on
the piano that slowly fade out with car noises sounding on top of that.
The song ends with some chords on the guitar that sound very different
(which explains the bright yellow line at the end of the timbre-based
matrix) and car noises.
Comparison
As I explained in the introduction, Queen is known for their
experimentation and deviation from the norm. On the previous tab this
could be seen in the matrices of the song Bohemian Rhapsody,
since there was some structure visible but not how you would expect a
typical rock or pop song to be arranged. The song that was written by
Roger Taylor had much more of a common and clear structure, as is the
case with a very typical song by Freddie Mercury as a solo artist. On
this page you can see the timbre- and pitch-based self-similarity
matrices of the song Living
on My Own. The song is in my view a classic Freddie Mercury song,
that features Freddie’s distinctive voice, flamboyant personality, and
his love for dance music. The song’s upbeat tempo, catchy melody, and
electronic production are all hallmarks of Freddie’s solo work.
Additionally, the song features a memorable chorus, which is typical of
Freddie’s ability to write catchy songs.
Freddie Mercury
The chroma-based matrix illustrates nicely through the diagonal lines
that there are lots of repetitions in the song. The songs starts with A
minor chords and when the next chord is introduced, there is a yellow
line in the chroma-based matrix (at around 25 seconds). At around 50
seconds, the chorus is introduced. In the same matrix it becomes clear
that the chorus repeats after another 35 seconds (approximately 85
seconds into the song). Next there is a break with some scatting and
improvisation on the piano, followed by halve of the chorus. The beat
that is used throughout the whole song accompanied by piano chords and
some occasional scatting are utilized as an outro. Though the true
ending is the artificial repetition of one ad lib by Freddie
Mercury.
Explanation
Coincidentally, this song is also not written by Freddie Mercury but by
Brian May. I found this song very interesting, because of it deviates
greatly from the normal style of Queen. It is a blend of folk and
progressive rock with acoustic instruments, vocal harmonies, and
storytelling lyrics. At around 35 seconds into the song the beat comes
in. This interestingly leads to a change in the chroma matrix but a much
less clear change in the timbre matrix. After one and a half minutes the
bridge introduces new chords. I find it very strange that this is so
clear in the timbre matrix but not in the chroma matrix. It almost feels
as though the matrices are switched around. Specially because the bright
yellow cross in the chroma matrix is exactly where the electric guitar
makes an appearance.
Conclusion
Once again this
electronic dance song by Freddie Mercury shows a noticeable
structure with some diagonal lines indicating repetition, here of the
chorus.
The song Innuendo by Queen, on the other hand, shows a very nice checkered pattern at the beginning and end, but there is a very different part in the middle. I think this is a good summary of Queen; some song will have a clear structure but they will always find a way to still make the song interesting, whereas Freddie Mercury’s songs are sometimes a little more simple and rhythmical. I also wanted to note that besides the structure of the song by Queen, the vocal performance is also very impressive which is typical for Freddie Mercury in general. “[Innuendo] would prove to be the last album Freddie worked upon and yet also, despite his palpably deteriorating health, a work containing some of his most powerful and emotive vocal performances of all.” as Queen said themselves. Definitely have a listen if you are not familiar with the song!
Tempogram
A tempogram shows for every possible tempo how well it matches with the
song. A good match turns up bright yellow and everywhere you see dark
blue, the tempo does not lign up with the song.
Explanation
In the self-similarity matrices I ended with the song Innuendo
by Queen. Even though the song has a very clear drum and rhythm, the
drum does make use of triplets which probably makes it more difficult to
detect a uniform tempo. When the very contrasting bridge starts (at
around 2:45), they start with a low energy guitar with hints of flamenco
along with soft vocals by Freddie Mercury. In this section the rhythm
sometimes slows down or speeds up to match the dynamics of the vocals
and other instruments, also known as rubato. Despite the fluctuation in
tempo, this section does seem to have a lower tempo which can also be
seen in the figure (there are more bright yellow bits between 80 and 120
BPM then before). Just before the 200 seconds mark, the speed picks up
and you hear guitar and clapping. Brian May incorporates Spanish guitar
techniques such as tremolo picking and arpeggios, which are commonly
found in Mediterranean and flamenco music. Flamenco music is also very
rhythmic; as you can see in the graph, this part has a much clearer
tempo though still not a very consistent tempo. Another section starts
at around 236 seconds, which is a sort of classical, operatic, walz
part.
This tempogram shows that despite the seemingly clear structure the song
has according to the self-similarity matrices, there is definitely a lot
going on in terms of rhythm and tempo.
Explanation
This
clearly structured song (as could be seen in the self-similarity
matrices) written by Roger Taylor has faintly more of a clear tempo. The
uptempo rock song has a driving rhythm and features Taylor’s vocals and
a prominent guitar riff from Brian May. The lyrics are about Taylor’s
love for his car and as I said before, the song also includes some car
sounds, but that did not change the accuracy of the tempogram.
As you shall see, the tempo might be more clear than the tempo in the previous song because the song is more focused on the percussion, but it is certainly not as unambigious as the following electronic songs by Freddie Mercury.
Explanation
All these songs are solo songs by Freddie Mercury. The bottom two are
part of the album Mr. Bad Guy, the other two are singles. The
songs are very electronic and disco inspired. As Freddie
Mercury said himself: “I wanted to cover such things as reggae
rhythms and I’ve done a couple of things with a symphony orchestra. It
has a very rich sound and it’s very beat orientated.” Electronic, beat
orientated songs such as these four are very likely to have a clearly
visible tempo. Thus, I was also curious about a very different song,
namely Barcelona, which you will see in the next tab.
Explanation
The song Barcelona
is very “un-rock ’n’ roll” as Freddie Mercury stated himself, just like
the rest of the album. It “really required a lot of discipline” and
“[the] ideas […] underwent significant changes along the road to
perfection.” (Freddie
Mercury’s official site). In other words, Freddie Mercury put a lot
of time and effort in the songs on the album Barcelona to
create something really unique. The album incorporates lots of classical
elements with more traditional pop characteristics. Classical music
often features multiple layers of melody and rhythm that interact in
complex ways, and this can make it difficult to separate out the
different elements of the music and plot them in a coherent tempogram.
This can be seen in the tempogram of the song Barcelona.
Conclusion
Interestingly, even though according to Dirk
Moelants (2002) the preferred tempo is between 120 and 130 beats per
minute (BPM), in this plot you can see that most songs are around 80
BPM. This is relatively slow and specially for the many disco inspired
songs by Freddie Mercury. The most frequent tempo is around 110 BPM for
Queen, and 160 BPM for Roger Taylor, but Queen has a more normal
distribution and the drummer’s songs are very evenly distributed.
I think we can say that Queen songs are overall a little hard to plot in a tempogram (which also ties back to the amount of standard deviation in the general tempo plot) while Freddie Mercury songs either have a very easy tempo to detect, as in his electronic disco songs, or songs in which the tempo is more complicated to plot in a tempogram, such as the more classical songs.
Reference
Moelants, D. (2002). Preferred tempo reconsidered. C. Stevens, D.
Burnham, G. McPherson, E. Schubert, J. Renwick (Eds.), Proceedings
of the 7th International Conference on Music Perception and
Cognition. Sydney, Adelaide, Causal Productions, 580–583.
Chordogram
These chordograms show the similarity for every bar of a song with
certain chords. The more similar the bar is to that specific chord, the
darker the color in the graph. When you see bright yellow, it is very
unlikely that chords was played in that bar.
The two songs are, in my opinion, quite similar in style. Both ballads have intricate piano arrangements and are a little more stripped down compared to the rest of the discography. That is why I thought it would be interesting to see how the chordograms compared to one another.
Time Waits for No One
Even though the plot looks quite clear, it is still harder to get all
the right chords since Freddie Mercury composed a complex piano
arrangement that has multiple chords (and definitely not only simple
triads or triads with the added 7th note) in one bar. I think that the
fact he only uses piano to accompany his vocals makes it seem easier to
plot in a chordogram, however, the dark blue boxes are all over the
place and not very accurate.
Love of My Life
At first glance it looks a little messy to me, but after listening to
the song and having a closer look at the plot I came to the conclusion
that the plot accurately shows that the song makes use of only a few
chords and I discovered that the start of the song was the clearest. The
song starts with an instrumental introduction that ends with an arpeggio
G major chord on the harp which can also be seen by the dark blue box at
20 seconds. When Freddie Mercury starts singing (after the arpeggio) the
accompanying chords are C, Am, Dm, G and then C, F, Dm, Am, B♭m, F which
I could also find in the figure. However, after the first yellow line,
which can be explained by the piano riff that is played, the plot gets a
little more muddy. There is another instrumental bit that focuses more
on melody than on triads and the second yellow line is created by the
walking bass line. At around 1 minute and 47 seconds, the third yellow
line, there is a guitar riff preceded by piano riffs with walking bass
lines. From 2 minutes and 20 seconds you can hear a guitar solo. At 2:27
(fourth yellow line) there is one sustained guitar note (with some piano
notes accompanying). After 193 seconds there is another arpeggio that
results in a dark blue box on F major.
Comparison
Overall, I think that Love of My Life seemed a little harder to
plot in a chordogram because of the instrumentation, but was in the end
more accurate than Time Waits for No One because there are less
different chords in one bar.
Explanation
I think it is interesting to see that in this very electronic song,
there is not a clear pattern in the chords, whereas in the former two
figures there was some sort of dark blue path throughout the plots. All
chords that include the 7 have a darker blue line across the entire
plot, which is explainable by the way pitches are constructed.
This song from the 85’s was released on his solo album Mr. Bad Guy and is just like the four songs in the tempograms a high-energy disco track with a prominent bassline, synth-heavy instrumentation, and Mercury’s signature vocals. Though there seems to be not much going on harmony wise, Freddie Mercury still has managed to make the song very interesting through syncopation and layers of synths, guitar, and percussion.
Explanation
Since Bohemian Rhapsody is such a complex song, I wondered what
it would look like in a chordogram. There are not many chords with high
energy and there is definitely not a clear pattern as was the case with
the first two plots. But I am able to see some of the structure of the
song in the plot. The song starts with the vocal arrangements and where
the bright yellow lines are visible, the bass comes in. After that there
is a slight change where the operatic part begins. Interestingly, when
they transition to the rock part, there is not as much of a change in
the graph. The outro looks much more like the intro as this part is once
again much more stripped down mainly focusing on vocals and a piano
arrangement.
Conclusion
I think there are mainly two styles Freddie Mercury went for in his solo
career: either focusing on elaborate arrangements, in the piano or in
vocal harmonies, or giving more of a disco feel by using a steady beat
and electronic sounds in the harmonies. Queen as a band naturally made
arrangements that highlighted all of the members and their instruments.
Which might be an explanation why Love of My Life has a little
less of an intricate piano arrangement and was thus more accurately
plotted in the chordogram than Time Waits for No One.
Explanation
Here you can see the distribution of keys for every artist. In the next
tab you can see the actual amounts (which can also be seen in if you
hover over the points), but as there is such a difference in playlist
length (see the table), I have chosen to first plot the ratio.
Interestingly, the key G major was very loved by Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor and the band after the death of the lead singer. When Freddie Mercury was still in the band, the key D major the most frequent. And overall, Queen seemed to use more major keys than minor keys. After all their music often has a uplifting and joyful feeling which generally goes hand in hand with a major key.
Number of Tracks per Artist
| Artist | Tracks |
|---|---|
| After the death | 13 |
| Band (Queen) | 159 |
| Freddie Mercury | 25 |
| Roger Taylor | 44 |
Numbers of Tracks per Artist
| Artist | Tracks |
|---|---|
| After the death | 13 |
| Band (Queen) | 159 |
| Freddie Mercury | 25 |
| Roger Taylor | 44 |
Dendrogram
In a dendrogram, items that are the most similar get clustered together.
The longer the paths and thus the further the connection, the less
similar the items or clusters are. I have used all features that are
within the Spotify API to cluster Freddie Mercury’s solo songs.
Freddie Mercury
I like how you can see the more classical songs, the electronic disco
songs and the remaining songs clustered. Both albums seem to have pretty
much their own distinct sound. Except for the song Mr. Bad
Guy which includes lots of orchestral instruments and therefore gets
clustered together with two more classical songs from the
Barcelona album. She
Blows Hot and Cold stands out, it is kind of the only outlier. It is
much more generic pop-rock and definitely not like the electronic songs
on the Mr. Bad Guy album. The song In
my Defence was not written by Freddie Mercury. Dave Clark wrote it
for the musical Time but the song still suits the singer very well. I am
not surprised it was clustered together with the song Made
in Heaven, as this is as much of a grand, theatrical and powerful
song.
Queen and Roger Taylor
I have also checked the clusters of Roger Taylor and Queen - because of
the big amount of tracks, both are very cluttered and thus I decided not
to include them - which had much less clear clusters than the dendrogram
of Freddie Mercury. However, one album by Queen very much stood out;
Flash Gordon was almost completely isolated from the rest of
the tracks. The two most similar songs by Queen were These are the
Days of our Lives and Delilah. After listening to the
songs, I can see the similarity in timbre but not much further than
that. The two songs ’39 and Leaving Home Ain’t Easy
were also clustered together. Both songs are written and sung by Brian
May and have a lot of country influences.
Explanation
In this dendrogram you can find all 25 tracks by Freddie Mercury I put
in the playlist compared to the first and last 25 songs by Queen using
all the features Spotify API has to offer.
Brighton Rock looks a bit like an outlier, as well as Procession (both have rather long branches), which are two songs from Queen in the early days. You will see on the next page how Procession is very different from the rest loudness wise. Brighton Rock tells a story about two lovers who meet in Brighton. If you listen to the song you can hear how they wander across the street on a national holiday, while street musicians are playing. The excitement but also rebellion are portrayed by the energetic guitar riffs that Brian May was able to play.
Conclusion
Overall, most Freddie Mercury songs are clustered together and the
earlier Queen songs too. The oldest Queen songs are a bit mixed together
with Freddie Mercury solo songs.
Confidence matrix
Based on the features danceability, energy, loudness, speechiness,
duration and timbre component 4, I made a model to predict whether a
song was by Freddie Mercury, early Queen or late Queen. These features
were the most important besides some other timbre features. I once again
put in all 25 songs by Freddie Mercury and the first and last 25 songs
by Queen. Here you can see how well the model did; the number in the
cells show for every combination (the three true categories and how the
three categories were predicted) how often this was the case. For
example, the first value (upper left corner) shows the number of times
the model predicted correctly that a song was by Freddie Mercury, the
value immediately below shows for every Freddie Mercury song number of
times it predicted it was an early Queen song and underneath that the
times that it predicted it as a late Queen song. Classifying Freddie
Mercury seems to be the easiest. But both the earliest and latest songs
by Queen were apparently also not too hard to classify, since the model
predicted most songs right. This could also be expected based on how the
dendrogram on the previous page already seemed to cluster most of the
songs by artist somewhat right.
| class | precision | recall |
|---|---|---|
| Freddie Mercury | 0.613 | 0.76 |
| Queen 1973 | 0.625 | 0.40 |
| Queen 1990 | 0.500 | 0.56 |
| class | precision | recall |
|---|---|---|
| Freddie Mercury | 0.60 | 0.72 |
| Queen 1973 | 0.80 | 0.64 |
| Queen 1990 | 0.56 | 0.56 |
Precision is the proportion of accurately predicted songs from all songs the model predicted to be from that artist. Recall shows from all songs that are actually from that artist the proportion that got predicted accurately. As you can see, the model using only the most important features has both higher and lower values and thus does not necessarily perform better than the model using all features Spotify API has to offer.
Explanation
The most important feature to tell Freddie Mercury apart from Queen is
timbre level 4, which shows the energy in attacks of sounds which might
translate in more abstract words to the sharpness of sounds. Outside of
the timbre features, loudness, danceability and speechiness were most
important.
Once again, the first few songs definitely sound different from the older songs and from Freddie Mercury songs in terms of clearness. The older songs sound a little more muffled and have more reverb on the vocals and guitar. However, when I listened to the songs with the highest and lowest value on timbre component 4, I noticed that the higher the value, the more kick there was in the song and specially in the beat. In other words, My Baby Does Me has a very strong beat with a sharp and high energy snare. When listening to Some Day One Day which according to the plot has the lowest value on timbre component 4, I heard that all sounds have the same energy. There is no sharp beat and it does sound a bit flat and lacks dynamics.
The song Procession by Queen has the lowest energy and that is very noticeable if you listen to the track. It starts with simply a soft beat and after that only features a guitar that sounds a bit in the distance. This might also be because the track is heavily panned to the left at the beginning and to the right from the second half.
Explanation
I also wanted to know whether Roger Taylor could be as easily classified
as Freddie Mercury and the band. Once again, Freddie Mercury was
classified very well and the same holds for early Queen. Later Queen and
Roger Taylor were a little less accurately classified, but not nearly as
bad as Queen after the death of the singer. The few songs that were
released in honor of Freddie Mercury have more in common with the solo
songs by both Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor than the songs by Queen
as a band.
| class | precision | recall |
|---|---|---|
| Freddie Mercury | 0.444 | 0.480 |
| Queen 1973 | 0.654 | 0.680 |
| Queen 1990 | 0.478 | 0.440 |
| Queen after Freddie | 0.222 | 0.154 |
| Roger Taylor | 0.500 | 0.560 |
Explanation
In terms of timbre, the groups are quite distinguishable as you can see
in the plot and in the former tab. As I have mentioned before, what this
exactly means is very hard to say as timbre is very abstract. Spotify
uses 12 different components to calculate timbre, which get more
abstract the higher the level. Therefore, you can probably imagine that
timbre component 9 is very incomprehensible, in fact, there is not even
a description of it. I am not able to fully grasp how this timbre
dimension works, as the song by Freddie Mercury with the highest value
is Guide
me Home, which is very much a classical song. While The
Hitman and Ogre
Battle are two of the most heavy songs by Queen that lean towards
metal, and also have a high value. However, I do think that those songs
are more intense in some way than the song with the lowest value Magic
is Loose
Conclusion
Even though I might not be able to hear a clear difference with regard
to timbre component 9, the five categories seem have enough differences
to be classified reasonably well. After the death of Freddie Mercury the
band released one last album with demo’s and ideas that Freddie Mercury
recorded when he didn’t have long to live. That some songs are
classified as solo songs by Freddie Mercury is not surprising as the
band members used unreleased work and songs from Freddie’s solo career,
which are infused with the signature sound of the band. You can read
more on this (in Dutch) on the Radio
Veronica site.